b.c. 1527, Milan, d.1593, Milan Italian Giuseppe Arcimboldo Galleries Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527, the son of Biagio, a painter who did work for the office of the Fabbrica in the Duomo.Arcimboldo was commissioned to do stained glass window designs beginning in 1549, including the Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria vitrage at the Duomo. In 1556 he worked with Giuseppe Meda on frescoes for the Cathedral of Monza. In 1558, he drew the cartoon for a large tapestry of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which still hangs in the Como Cathedral today. In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols. Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, fruit and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind.. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci, a fellow Milanese), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times. Arcimboldo died in Milan, to which he retired after leaving the Habsburg service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career. His hidden-face still-lives are a possible influence on his younger Lombard contemporary Caravaggio, whose painting of fruit in the Brera museum in Milan ranks as one of the earliest independent still-lives. When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection. His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, and the Candie Museum in Guernsey also own paintings by Archimboldo.  Related Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo :. | Spring | Esquire Summer | The Librarian | the jurist | Summer |
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CLAEISSENS, Antoon
Flemish painter (b. ca. 1538, Brugge, d. 1613, Brugge). Flemish painter and draughtsman. In 1587 he was working in Rome with the Brussels painter Frans van de Kasteele. That he subsequently lived in Brussels is confirmed by documentary evidence and by his status as court painter to the governors of the southern Netherlands. Stylistically, de Clerck's work (both paintings and drawings) is close to that of the Antwerp late Mannerist Marten de Vos, traditionally thought to have been his teacher, but it is possible that he was apprenticed to Joos van Winghe in Italy. He was later a member of the Brussels painters' guild, where from 1601 to 1611 Jan van Overstraeten was registered as his pupil. It was in 1594 that de Clerck was appointed court painter in Brussels, first to Archduke Ernest. In 1596, after the Archduke's death, his brother Emperor Rudolf II arranged for de Clerck to stay on as court painter in the service of the new Archdukes, Albert and Isabella. In 1609 de Clerck and Wenceslas Cobergher were commissioned to decorate the ceiling of the oratorium in the archducal palace in Brussels
Huntington Daniel
American Hudson River School Painter. b.1816 d.1906 was born in New York City, New York, the son of Benjamin Huntington, Jr. and Faith Trumbull Huntington; his paternal grandfather was Benjamin Huntington, delegate at the Second Continental Congress and First U.S. Representative from Connecticut. In 1835 he studied with SFB Morse, and produced "A Bar-Room Politician" and "A Toper Asleep." Subsequently he painted some landscapes on the Hudson river, and in 1839 went to Rome. On his return to America he painted portraits and began the illustration of The Pilgrim's Progress, but his eyesight failed, and in 1844 he went back to Rome. Returning to New York around 1846, he devoted his time chiefly to portrait-painting, although he has painted many genre, religious and historical subjects. He was president of the National Academy from 1862 to 1870, and again in 1877-1890.
MASSYS, Quentin
Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1465-1530 Quentin Massys, also spelled Matsys or Metsys, was born in Louvain, the son of a blacksmith. He is traditionally thought to have been trained in that craft by his father. Art in Louvain while Massys was growing up was dominated by Dirk Bouts. Massys became a member of the painters' guild in Antwerp in 1491 and died there in 1530. He represented a current of painting that flourished in Antwerp at this time of its sudden new prosperity. Erwin Panofsky (1953) described this trend, "archaism of around 1500," as "a prelude to, in fact a fact of, the Renaissance in Netherlandish painting," which prevailed in the southern Netherlands. The monumental Enthroned Madonna (Brussels), an early work by Massys, has features recalling both Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck. The central panel of Massys' imposing St. Anne Altarpiece, or the Holy Kinship (Brussels), which was commissioned for the church of St-Pierre in Louvain in 1507 and signed and dated 1509, has a prototype in the Holy Kinship of Geertgen tot Sint Jans. Even the physical types and costumes in Massys' version refer to Geertgen's. But Massys placed his rhythmically balanced figure groups in a domed, arcaded loggia that in architectural style appears to be reaching for a Renaissance vocabulary it cannot quite attain; certainly the architecture evokes a later period than that represented by the Gothic throne of the Enthroned Madonna. The calm and restraint of the St. Anne Altarpiece are replaced by heightened emotional expression in the next important painting by Massys that can be firmly dated, the Deposition triptych (Antwerp). This was commissioned in 1508 by the guild of joiners in Antwerp for their chapel in the Cathedral; Massys completed the composition in 1511. It was inspired by Rogier van der Weyden's great Deposition, which was in the church of St-Pierre in Louvain in Massys' time, and also quotes from Rogier's Entombment. Massys painted genre subjects, possibly with emblematic meaning, such as A Money Changer and His Wife, which belonged to a Netherlandish tradition that maintained its popularity right through the 17th century. In portraiture he made significant contributions. His pair of portraits of Erasmus and Petrus Aegidius, painted in 1517 for Sir Thomas More, set the pattern for representations of the scholar in his study.